Bad Business Twitter Strategies

Are You Committing the Sinful Five, You Twit?

You want to bring your business to Web 2.0 standards. Myspace takes some effort, and Facebook isn’t exactly business-friendly. Naturally, your next stop is Twitter, the microblogging powerhouse utilized by small businesses, -celebrities and the average Joe — your target audience. But many businesses fail on Twitter within the first few months, mostly because they utilize bad business Twitterstrategies.

Many businesses think they can abuse Twitter with links and promotions, but that is the quickest way to lose potential customers and gain spam status.

Here is what you need to avoid.

Bad Business Twitter Strategies1. Only posting links or promotional content. Twitter is a personable social networking platform, and using it only for promotion goes against what Twitter stands for. Your Twitteraudience probably does not like receiving spam mail or spam phone calls, and it won’t work on Twitter either. If you need a place to post promotional material, use your website. Or better yet, stick with print ads.

The average Twitter wants interesting, personal content, not a ad ripped from Sunday’s newspaper. If you must post business links, keep it sparse. And make sure to add a personal touch when posting. Twitters appreciate it.

2. Listening to so-called “Social Media Marketing experts”. For every five twitters, there’s one twitter that claims to be an expert in social media. They have a taste for spam and like to post links to blogs spouting off their knowledge about how to amass a huge following. Note: they don’t tell you how to gain a solid, strong following where the Twitters are actually interested in what you have to say. If you look closely at their own followers, it consists of — big surprise here — spammers and so-called Social Media Marketing experts. Experts who are too busy promoting their own business. People who are interested in quantity, not quality. These experts utilize bad business Twitter strategies by focusing on the number, not the profit.

If an expert chooses to follow you or give you advice, you know where the block button is.

3. Reposting the same information. It seems like common sense, but many businesses retweet their own information, sometimes several times a day. Businesses: Would you call your customers several times a day to promote a sale?

Of course not, unless you want a proverbial kick in the balls. I don’t know why businesses think these are good Twitter strategies, but they do it anyways, throwing up the same links and information several times a day. You want to get unfollowed? Then by all means, do this. But if you want to avoid bad Twitter strategies, start by stopping the retweets to yourself, the redistribution of this morning’s information, and constant spamming of sales. People don’t want to hear your message repeated several times a day, and your average Joe will block you faster than you can say “Please RT!”.

4. Posting too much. Using your Twitter regularly is a good thing, but be careful not to overdo it. If it would get your banned in a chatroom, avoid it on Twitter. It’s bad to post five times in a row. It’s worse to do it every day. Posting too much in a day or posting several times in a row are bad business strategies you should always avoid. If you must, leave one or two hours between tweets, and make sure the content is relevant. And as always, trim down any retweets, as it counts as repetitive information that no one likes to hear.

5. Too many retweets. I don’t know who thought this was a good idea — it really isn’t. Businesses think that retweeting information that includes them to their own Twitter will drive traffic and sales, and while it might, it’s alsocompletely annoying. Maybe your Social Media Marketing experts won’t mind since they won’t read your content anyways, but for the average Joe will mind. If you have to retweet, make sure it’s not promotional. No one minds if you retweet about a missing child or Michele Bachmann’s crazy antics. But if you continuously retweet information about the new renovations in your store, people will get very, very annoyed with you.

Bad Business Twitter Strategies – Another Word of AdviceThe most important thing for businesses to remember is this — don’t be fake, don’t be annoying, and for heaven’s sake, don’t be too promotional. Remember, if a Twitter fan says hi, the correct response is not “Hi, have you seen our latest sale? Find more information here!”. The key word is honesty. If you see a so-called Social Media Marketing expert doing it, do the opposite (since they’re the kings of bad business twitter strategies, you know). Keep that in mind, Twitter honestly, and watch the followers trickle in. You’ll feel better about it too.

Facebook Reiterates That You Can Reject Friends Without Looking Like A Jerk

via TechCrunch MG Siegler

Last night, I wrote about the largely unstated but well known rule-of-thumb for Twitter: That people with more followers than the number of people they are following, tend to be better people to follow. Such a ratio cannot exist on Facebook because unlike Twitter, it has a symmetric social graph — if you friend someone, they have to accept your friend request or else there is absolutely no connection (not including Fan pages). This puts additional pressure on you to accept all friend requests. It can be a burden.

And I think Facebook realizes that, which is why we’re getting a post today on its blog basically explaining that it’s okay not to accept all requests.

Specifically, the post notes that if you click the button to ignore a friend request, the person who requested you will not be notified about it. Likewise, if you accept someone as a friend, but then later un-friend them, they will not be notified (though they will no longer be able to see your information, nor will you be able to see their’s). And if you don’t want to accept them, but don’t want them to be able to attempt to friend you again, Facebook recommends simply leaving their request pending in your queue.

It’s interesting that Facebook felt the need to go over this again. That seems to speak to confusion over the symmetric nature of its social graph in a world of Twitter and other social services in which the “follower” is more common than the “friend.” Of course, there are benefits to this type of network, the key one being privacy.

But the problem is that as Facebook continues to grow and evolve, we’re getting more and more requests from random people that we don’t actually know. But many of us are using Facebook to spread informationjust as we do with Twitter (status updates, sharing links, etc), and there is some desire to allow these random people to be able to see some of what you are doing on Facebook. This is why Facebook created the “Everyone Button” and Fan Pages, but both of those seem to complicate the social graph, rather than simplify it.

The solution that I employ is to accept all Facebook friend requests but limit the people I do not actually know to a very basic profile using Facebook’s filters. I then hide many of these people from my main News Feed. The problem is that they still show up when I do things like search for something. It’s a less than ideal solution. Plus, many users of Facebook probably still aren’t using filters (or at least not using them well).

It will be interesting to see how Facebook deals with this issue going forward. Remember that they just purchased FriendFeed, which features a combination of an asymmetric social graph with great filters. I can’t help but wonder if Facebook won’t eventually switch to something like that.

Of course, we’re also hearing that they’re very close to launching their location functionality (just likeTwitter recently did), which will once again highlight the importance of privacy. Almost all location-based services are currently symmetric, because while it’s one thing for random people to read your words or see what links you’re sharing, it’s another for them to know where you are. Because of that, on services likeLoopt and Foursquare I stick pretty firmly to only accepting users that I actually know.

As they approach 300 million users, Facebook continually has the tough situation of having to deal withthese issues while figuring out how to educate all their current users if they intend to make a change. Of course, having 300 million users is a problem a lot of social networks would like to have.

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